Kunstlerhttp://kunstler.com
“America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.”Mon, 11 Dec 2017 14:35:21 +0000en-UShourly1clusterfucknationhttps://feedburner.google.comAbracadabrahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/xn9a6g8R3Bg/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/abracadabra/#commentsMon, 11 Dec 2017 14:33:11 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8725Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! Patreon has apparently decided to take a slightly bigger cut of your contributions and some of you are dropping out in protest. This only hurts your blogger, who works diligently to bring you this column twice a week. Your recurring contribution keeps the lights on here. In turn, more »

Patreon has apparently decided to take a slightly bigger cut of your contributions and some of you are dropping out in protest. This only hurts your blogger, who works diligently to bring you this column twice a week. Your recurring contribution keeps the lights on here. In turn, I need to pay the web manager and the website-hosting server. Please give the equivalent of a cup of coffee each month to keep Clusterfuck Nation going!

And so, as they say in the horror movies, it begins…! The unwinding of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. Such an esoteric concept! Is there one in ten thousand of the millions of people who sit at desks all day long from sea to shining sea who have a clue how this works? Or what its relationship is to the real world?

I confess, my understanding of it is incomplete and schematic at best — in the way that my understanding of a Las Vegas magic act might be. All the flash and dazzle conceals the magician’s misdirection. The magician is either a scary supernatural being or a magnificent fraud. Anyway, the audience ‘out there’ for the Federal Reserve’s magic act — x-million people preoccupied by their futures slipping away, their cars falling apart, their kid’s $53,000 college loan burden, or the $6,000 bill they just received for going to the emergency room with a cut finger — wouldn’t give a good goddamn even if they knew the Fed’s magic show was going on.

So, the Fed has this thing called a balance sheet, which is actually a computer file, filled with entries that denote securities that it holds. These securities, mostly US government bonds of various categories and bundles of mortgages wrangled together by the mysterious government-sponsored entity called Freddie Mac, represent about $4.5 trillion in debt. They’re IOUs that supposedly pay interest for a set number of years. When that term of years expires, the Fed gets back the money it loaned, which is called the principal. Ahhhh, here’s the cute part!

You see, the money that the Fed loaned to the US government (in exchange for a bond) was never there in the first place. The Fed prestidigitated it out of an alternate universe. They gave this money to a “primary dealer” bank in exchange for the bond, which the bank abracadabraed up for the US Treasury. Well, not really. In fact, the Fed just made a notation on the bank’s “reserve” account that the money from the alternate universe appeared there. Somehow that money was sent via a virtual pneumatic tube to the US Treasury, where it was used to pay for drones to blow up Yemeni wedding parties, and for the Secret Service to visit pole dancing bars when the president traveled to foreign lands.

Here’s the fun part. The Fed announces that it is going to shed this nasty debt, at about $10 billion worth a month starting this past October. Their stated goal is to reach an ultimate wind-down velocity of $50 billion a month (cue laugh track). If they ever get there (cue laugh track) it would take 20 years to complete the wind-down. The chance of that happening is about the same as the chance that Janet Yellen will come down your chimney on December 24 with a sack-full of chocolate Bitcoins. But never mind the long view for the moment.

One way they plan to accomplish this feat is to “roll off” the bonds. That is, when the bonds mature — i.e. come to the end of their term — they will cease to exist. Poof! Wait a minute! When a bond matures, the issuer has to send the principal back to the lender. After all, the Fed lent the US Treasury X-billion dollars, the US Treasury paid interest on the loan for X-years, and now it has to fork over the full value of the loan (hopefully in dollars that have magically inflated over the years and are now worth less than when they were borrowed — another magic trick!). But that doesn’t happen.

Instead, when the theoretical principal is returned to the Fed, the Fed disappears the money, like the girl in a bikini onstage who enters the magician’s sacred box and vanishes. Now you see her, now you don’t. The explanation, of course, might be that the money was never really there in the first place, so it makes sense to fire it back to the alternative universe it came from. Well, uh, I guess….

The catch is: for a while it was here on earth and folks were doing stuff with it, such as the aforementioned drone strikes and pole dancers. Not only that, but the “primary dealer” banks were allowed to loan out ten times the reserve minimum denoted on their Fed accounts for participating in the scheme. Who did they lend all that money to? Apparently, a lot of it went to corporations who borrowed it at ultra-low interest rates in order to buy back their own stock, which paid dividends way higher than the interest rate they borrowed at to buy the stuff, and which also pumped up the share value of the stocks, which also happened to make the executives of the corporations way richer in terms of their stock options and bonuses (awarded for boosting the share value of the stock!).

And so, shazzam: I give you the one-percent! And a bankrupt United States of America.

And don’t even ask about all those bundles of janky Freddie Mac mortgages fobbed off on the Fed. The reason they did that in the first place was because those mortgages weren’t being paid off, and the banks and insurance companies that held them were choking to death on them. So they parked them in a crawl space under the Fed’s Eccles Building in Washington, hoping they would just turn to compost And guess what: they’re no more valuable now then they were then. File that one under Necrophilia.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/abracadabra/feed/329http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/abracadabra/Stranger Thingshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/oAxQL6-N8AI/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/stranger-things/#commentsFri, 08 Dec 2017 14:31:21 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8710Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! Patreon has apparently decided to take a bigger cut of your contributions and some of you are dropping out in protest. This only hurts your blogger, who works diligently to bring you this column twice a week. Your recurring contribution keeps the lights on here. In turn, I more »

Patreon has apparently decided to take a bigger cut of your contributions and some of you are dropping out in protest. This only hurts your blogger, who works diligently to bring you this column twice a week. Your recurring contribution keeps the lights on here. In turn, I need to pay the web manager and the website-hosting server. Please give the equivalent of a cup of coffee each month to keep Clusterfuck Nation going!

The hidden agenda in the so-called tax reform bill is to act as stop-gap quantitative easing to plug the “liquidity” hole that is opening up as the Federal Reserve (America’s central bank) makes a few gestures to winding down its balance sheet and “normalizing” interest rates. Thus, the aim of the tax bill is to prop up capital markets, and the apprehension of this lately is what keeps stocks making daily record highs. Okay, sorry, a lot to unpack there.

Primer: quantitative easing (QE) is a the Federal Reserve’s weasel phrase for its practice of just creating “money” out of thin air, which it uses to buy US Treasury bonds (and other stuff). The Fed buys this stuff through intermediary Too Big To Fail banks which allows them to cream off a cut and, theoretically, pump the “money” into the economy. This “money” is the “liquidity.” As it happens, most of that money ends up in the capital markets. Stocks go up and up and bond yields stay ultra low with bond prices ultra high. What remains on the balance sheets are a shit-load of IOUs.

The third round of QE was officially halted in 2014 in the USA. However, the world’s other main central banks acted in rotation — passing the baton of QE, like in a relay race — so that when the US slacked off, Japan, Britain, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of China, took over money-printing duties. And because money flies easily around the world via digital banking, a lot of that foreign money ended up in “sure-thing” US capital markets (as well as their own ). Mega-tons of “money” were created out of thin air around the world since the near-collapse of the system in 2008.

And magically, with no negative consequences! Yet. Now, Europe and Japan are making noises about dropping their batons. China’s banking system is so opaque and perverse — because it is unaccountable except to the ruling party with its own agenda — that it’s quite impossible to tell what they are really doing, though the signs of mal-investment are obvious and startling. And the UK’s finances are tied up in its messy divorce proceedings with the EU (with the British standard of living dropping markedly meanwhile). In short, the torrent of global “liquidity” looks to be slowing to a trickle.

The expectation is that this would make stock markets go down and bond interest rates to go up (fewer buyers), perhaps a lot. The dirty open secret here is that these central bank interventions are the only means for keeping the capital markets up, and that the markets are just a Potemkin false front for Western economies that are drying up and blowing away. That is certainly the experience here in the USA, where banking hocus-pocus now accounts for about 30 percent of GDP, and most of that activity is either out-and-out fraud or swindling, or collecting rents and dividends on past frauds and swindles.

Dem/Prog America in its Silicon Valley gourmet employee bistros and Hamptons lawn parties thinks that the flyover Trumpist Red State world of meth, joblessness, and anomie is some kind of a Netflix hallucination. But no, it’s for real. The center of the ole US of A is hollowed out. The bad news is that it probably has enough juice left in its disaffected youth, and certainly enough weaponry, to start a very serious insurrection if it continues to get dissed.

Enter the joker in the deck: Bitcoin. Though it pulled back a couple of thou overnight, this strange investment vehicle blasted through $18,000-per-Bitcoin in the past 24 hours, roughly tripling from $6000 in one month. It even endured the hacking of one of its exchanges, NiceHash, where $70 million was looted without so much as a stutter in the upward thrust of the chart. Whatever else Bitcoin is — and I would suggest a “Ponzie,” a “mania,” a “con” — this thing is a message. The message is that financial circulatory system of the global economy is in some kind of distress. Another take-away is that the rush into Bitcoin represents a loss of faith in matrix of rackets that world banking has become, and a flight to perceived safety in a putative financial instrument beyond the clutches and the lying propaganda of nervous, self-interested governments.

For the moment, Bitcoin is doing the job that gold used to do: indexing the loss of value in paper currencies and the things that affect to represent them. Except that Bitcoin has no material reality. It is a figment of mathematics. The vaunted blockchain “technology” is just a formula for packaging information and assigning it to live in various places. It appears to have some worth as a ledger system, for keeping track of accumulated value in an allegedly transparent and honest mode. But the thing it is toting up and sending chits around the world for — Bitcoin — has no value in and of itself.

If “money” can be said to represent a future claim on work, or energy, or things that they produce, then Bitcoin is not money at all because it only represents energy burned in the computer exertions necessary to “mine” the Bitcoins. In other words, it costs a lot of energy to create Bitcoins, and there’s no claim on future energy, or work — it’s already gone. That energy use is catching the world’s attention and is beginning to look pretty profligate. Like, if Bitcoin happened to shoot up over $100,000-per-unit, it would hog an unseemly portion of the worlds electric power.

Anyway, that’s only one interpretation of the Bitcoin rush. In the end, I believe it’s simply telling us that the global financial system is headed for some serious trouble. It is vectoring right smack into the same lane as the gathering political crisis in the US government, as a fight to death between Donald Trump and his adversaries comes darkly into view.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/stranger-things/feed/340http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/stranger-things/December 2017http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/0yTo_bm4vUo/
http://kunstler.com/eyesore-of-the-month/december-2017/#commentsMon, 04 Dec 2017 16:22:53 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8704Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! Behold, the site of Bill Gates’s City of the Future! No, that’s not Mars. That’s 25,000 acres of barrel cactus and scorpions in the neighborhood of Tonopah, Arizona, about fifty miles from Phoenix. I suppose it seems a smart place for a city if you think water comes from more »

Behold, the site of Bill Gates’s City of the Future! No, that’s not Mars. That’s 25,000 acres of barrel cactus and scorpions in the neighborhood of Tonopah, Arizona, about fifty miles from Phoenix. I suppose it seems a smart place for a city if you think water comes from iPhones, or that you don’t have to grow food anywhere near where people live, or that Happy Motoring will continue indefinitely by other means than gasoline. A lot of people believe these things — especially the “intellectuals-yet-idiots” beloved of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, Antifragile, and other books. Many of the people running things in America these days are exactly those intellectuals-yet idiots. They have no idea where this society is actually heading, only techno-narcissistic fantasies about a future of ever-more stuff materialized out of thin air (like the “money” issued by the Federal Reserve). Bill Gates has so much of this money, you wonder if he even knows what the managers, Cascade Investment LLC, and a real estate development outfit called Belmont Partners, are doing in his name. I predict that the $80 million so far given to this project will go up in a vapor and that nothing will ever be built here. Bill G can just write it off as a tax loss.

]]>http://kunstler.com/eyesore-of-the-month/december-2017/feed/6http://kunstler.com/eyesore-of-the-month/december-2017/What Now?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/jPLpGl3OD8A/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-now-3/#commentsMon, 04 Dec 2017 14:25:50 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8695Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! “Contact with Russians.” Grown men and women, doubling and re-doubling down on a political fantasy, repeat this prayer hour after hour on the cable channels and Web waves as if trying to exorcise a nation possessed by the unholy hosts of more »

“Contact with Russians.” Grown men and women, doubling and re-doubling down on a political fantasy, repeat this prayer hour after hour on the cable channels and Web waves as if trying to exorcise a nation possessed by the unholy hosts of Hell. But such vicars of the news as Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd, and Dean Baquet (of The New York Times) only shove the country closer to a cliff of constitutional crisis.

To a certain class of people — a class that includes a lot of Intellectuals-Yet-Idiots, as Nassim Taleb has dubbed them — President Donald Trump is a figure of supernatural malignity who must be ousted at all costs. I did not vote for Donald Trump and I do not admire him; but I rather resent the dishonesty that is being marshaled against him, especially the mis-use of judicial procedure and the mendacious propagandizing of the nation in service to that end.

This is what it comes down to: General Mike Flynn, designated National Security Advisor, conferred with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after the 2016 election about two pressing matters: a vote in the UN orchestrated against Israel, and sanctions imposed against Russia by outgoing President Obama on December 28, two weeks before the inauguration. Both these matters could be viewed as bits of mischief designed deliberately to create foreign policy problems for the incoming administration.

Flynn’s discussions with Ambassador Kislyak amounted to what are called “back channel talks.” These informal, probing communications occur all the time and everywhere in American foreign policy, especially the transitional months every four or eight years when a new president comes in. They are necessarily secret because they concern issues of high sensitivity. Every incoming presidential staff in my lifetime (going back to Dwight Eisenhower) has conducted back-channel talks with foreign diplomats in order to directly assess where things stand, minus public posturing and bloviating.

And so that is what Mike Flynn did, as incoming National Security Advisor, after an eight-year run of worsening relations with Russia under Obama that Trump publicly pledged to improve. And now he’s been charged with lying to the FBI about it. Which raises some enormous and troubling questions well beyond the simple charge, questions that suggest a US government at war against itself.

For instance, why exactly might Mike Flynn lie about his discussions with Kislyak? That ought to be self-evident as per what I said above: back channel talks are necessarily secret. But why not let Vice-president Pence or the FBI in on it? As for Pence, not all government officials are in-the-loop for back channel talks for the excellent reason that the fewer people involved the less chance of the talks becoming un-secret.

And the FBI? Why, in December of 2016, might Trump and his aides consider the FBI to be an unreliable agency? Because they knew that officials in the FBI under Director James Comey had politicized the agency in favor of his opponent in the election; that the agency had misbehaved in the Clinton e-mail investigation, the meeting at the Phoenix airport between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and the Christopher Steele Russian intel file affair. We don’t know whether, at that point, Trump and his staff knew about the FBI’s conduct in the Uranium One deal. But there was plenty of evidence that the permanent bureaucracy of Washington wanted to use a politicized FBI against Trump in any way that it could to get rid of him.

And over the weekend, news comes out that Peter Strzok, the top FBI official assigned to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of collusion between Russia and Trump officials, had been removed from the probe after exchanging anti-Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton text messages with his mistress, who was an FBI lawyer working for Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. This information was concealed from the congressional oversight committee that had formally subpoenaed emails from the FBI all year long, only to be stonewalled by the agency. So, now the committee is threatening contempt citations against the current FBI Director, Christopher Fry and Rod Rosenstein, his deputy

Why should President Trump not fire Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller now? Mueller was James Comey’s mentor at the FBI when Mueller was director. Is there not a train of association and dishonesty that implicates criminal activity by the FBI itself. And if and when Trump does this, and pardons Mike Flynn for the non-crime of back channel negotiation, should a new special prosecutor be appointed by the Attorney General to investigate the activities of the FBI through 2016 and 2017? And after all that, will the Deep State find some other way to go apeshit?

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-now-3/feed/528http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-now-3/Whipping-Post Politicshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/TSUiV6PhU2Y/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/whipping-post-politics/#commentsFri, 01 Dec 2017 13:48:20 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8681Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! Charlie Rose skulked offstage like a punch-drunk palooka with barely a whimper, and Matt Lauer offered up the now laughably pro forma press release of bathetic apology and contrition — no doubt micro-managed by his attorneys. But the hit on Garrison more »

Charlie Rose skulked offstage like a punch-drunk palooka with barely a whimper, and Matt Lauer offered up the now laughably pro forma press release of bathetic apology and contrition — no doubt micro-managed by his attorneys. But the hit on Garrison Keillor by his old friend Minnesota Public Radio seemed like a new low in the whipping-post politics of the moment.

Unlike the cases of Rose, Lauer, Louis CK, Harvey Weinstein, and Kevin Spacey, there seemed next to nothing in the case against Keillor. He says he placed his hand on a lady’s bare back, someone on the crew or cast or a guest on The Prairie Home Companion radio show he hosted for close to forty years. Maybe MinnPR has a file full of complaints against the old trooper, but if so they’ve released nothing, no details whatsoever, and unlike the previously “outed” line-up, in Keillor’s case no other “victims” have come forward on their own to establish anything like a pattern of truly bad behavior.

I happen to admire Keillor’s substantial body of work in print and radio, and the public persona he presented, which portrayed a lot of what was honorable, intelligent, charming, and funny in our national character, something we need to be reminded of in this new era of pervasive racketeering, affronts to the first amendment, ubiquitous porno-culture, and Deep State mischief. This may amaze some of you, but to me Keillor deserves to be ranked with Mark Twain as a literary icon. What he gave to his large radio audience over a very long run was of uniformly high quality — something manifestly absent in so many other areas of contemporary life and art.

Keillor was reputed to be a cold-fish backstage and offstage, a prickly Aspergery personality who avoided personal contact. He said as much in his very brief published response to getting fired.

“Anyone who ever was around my show can tell you that I was the least physically affectionate person in the building,” Keillor said. “Actors hug, musicians hug, people were embracing every Saturday night left and right, and I stood off in the corner like a stone statue.”

To me, the job on Keillor was a hit too far. I hope others out there with their frontal cortexes intact felt themselves crossing a threshold into a strange new un-American society where the merest allegation can instantly send anyone to perdition. It’s gotten to the point where any man who ever made pass at someone is now defined as a sexual predator, feeding the delusional trope that all women are everywhere and always “victims,” and that human nature itself has to be transformed to correct this flaw in human design.

Well, guess what — that’s not going to happen. Men will continue to initiate sexual liaisons and relations. They will make the first move. They will take a chance. They will be advised to act like gentlemen in doing this, but I don’t think that’s quite what the witch-hunters really want right now. The PC movement, with its branches in the media, on campus, and professional politics, is out for coercion and punishment by any means necessary. That’s why there are kangaroo courts in the universities, in case you haven’t noticed. Due process is not just unwelcome, it’s officially scorned as passe. The method du jour in the case of Garrison Keilor, so far, is career and reputational castration.

The so-called thinking class in this country seems unaware that the mixed-gender office workplace — where most jobs can be done by anyone — is a relative novelty in human history. Not only that, but if indeed we’re heading into a long emergency of collapsing techno-industrial arrangements — as I have asserted in my books and blogs — then we may once again find ourselves in world with different divisions of labor, and a manifest change of values to attend it. It’s laughable to me that so many well-educated people assume that our current mode of living is permanent, but I suppose that’s part and parcel of the religion of progress. In the meantime, adults of the two sexes — and there are two sexes, not thirty-two — consort in the workplace with all kinds of stimulation and frisson quickening the scene, and we are foolish enough to be surprised when sexual mischief happens.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/whipping-post-politics/feed/585http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/whipping-post-politics/KunstlerCast 297 — Yakking With David Collum of Cornell U as Markets Reach New All-time Highshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/WytaoRJujc4/
http://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast-297-yakking-david-collum-cornell-u-markets-reach-new-time-highs/#commentsWed, 29 Nov 2017 19:48:10 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8670Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! David Collum, an old friend of this podcast, is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, but he may be better known these days as a wicked funny commentator on the economy and financial markets. He writes more »

David Collum, an old friend of this podcast, is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, but he may be better known these days as a wicked funny commentator on the economy and financial markets. He writes an annual end-of-year wrap-up and forecast, which I interrupted him working on when I hauled him over to Skype to yak about the current situation. There’s some weird Skype background noise at a couple of places in the recording. It doesn’t last more than a minute or two, so hang in there. Kinda sounds like the Exorcist tuning up a couple of demons-from-Hell in an elevator shaft. There are apparently strange forces in the Skype-o-verse.

]]>http://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast-297-yakking-david-collum-cornell-u-markets-reach-new-time-highs/feed/8http://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast-297-yakking-david-collum-cornell-u-markets-reach-new-time-highs/Exit Signhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/SWw7fp7K4Q0/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/exit-sign/#commentsMon, 27 Nov 2017 14:33:44 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8657Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! Shoeshine boys in airports ‘round the world must be whispering about Bitcoin as the crypto-currency coils upward to tickle the $10,000 line. Ethereum’s roaring up, too, along with most other cryptos, from Byteball Bytes to Tattoocoin (Limited Edition). Whatever else you more »

Shoeshine boys in airports ‘round the world must be whispering about Bitcoin as the crypto-currency coils upward to tickle the $10,000 line. Ethereum’s roaring up, too, along with most other cryptos, from Byteball Bytes to Tattoocoin (Limited Edition). Whatever else you think about it, this action is sending a message, perhaps several.

One would be Get Rich Quick, of course. Eight months ago, you could have copped Bitcoin for a mere $1000, and around Labor Day it touched $5000, which seemed, well, figment-ish. In the last two weeks it went all out hockey-stick, doubling. To a certain sort of mind this must seem irresistible. The result: a good old-fashioned mania. Digital tulip bulbs.

Another message probably goes something like duck-and cover. Some nervous nellies are seeking shelter in Bitcoin as they detect tremors in the more traditional markets creeping ever-higher to new records. To some degree, Bitcoin may be doing the job that gold used to do, providing the aura of a “safe haven” from a possible global financial mega-storm. The last time such an event came out nowhere (ha!) after the “permanent plateau” of 1929 collapsed, the government confiscated as much physical gold as it could get its paws on. So who wants to be there? (Echo answers….)

These days, the zeitgeist also points to new-and-improved government monkey business for shoving global populations into cashless monetary regimes where the authorities could monitor and control (and collect a vig on) all transactions — and there is the theory, at least, that Bitcoin’s block-chain computer math would be secure from any government’s clutches.

I’m not so sanguine about Bitcoin’s supposed impregnability, nor about many of its other appealing claims. The Mt. Gox affair of 2014 must be forgotten now, but back then some sharpie hacked 850,000 Bitcoins (valued over $450,000,000) out of the exchange, which was processing almost two-thirds of all the Bitcoin trades in the world. Mt. Gox went out of business. Bitcoin tanked and then traded sideways for three years until (coincidentally?) the Golden Golem of Greatness was elected Leader of the Free World. Hmmmm…..

Not many readers understand the first thing about block-chain math, your correspondent among them. But I am aware that the supposed safety of Bitcoin lies in its feature of being an algorithm distributed among a network of computers world-wide, so that it kind of exists everywhere-and-nowhere at the same time, a highly-valued ghost in the techno-industrial meta-machine.

However, the electric energy required for “mining” each Bitcoin — that is, the computations required for updating the block-chain network — is enough to boil almost 2000 liters of water. This is happening world-wide, and a lot of the Bitcoin “mining” is powered by coal-burning electric plants, making it the first Steampunk currency. If Bitcoin were to keep rising to $1,000,000 per unit, as many investors hope and pray, there wouldn’t be enough electric power in the world to keep it going.

Pardon me if I seem skeptical about the whole scheme. Even without Bitcoin bringing extra demand onto the scene, America’s electrical grid is already an aging rig of rags and tatters. There are a lot of ways that the service could be interrupted, perhaps for a long time in the case of an electric magnetic pulse (EMP). I’m not convinced that crypto-currencies are beyond the clutches of government, either. Around the world, in their campaign to digitize all money, there must be a deep interest in either hijacking existing block-chains, or creating official government Bit-monies to seal the deal of total control over financial transactions they seek.

Anyway, there are already over 1300 private cryptos and, apparently, a theoretically endless ability to create ever new ones — though the electricity required does seem to be a limiting factor. Maybe governments will shut them down for being energy-hogs.

My personal take on the phenomenon is that it represents the high point of techno-narcissism — the idea that technology is now so magical that it over-rides the laws of physics. That, for me, would be the loudest “sell” signal. I’d just hate to be in that rush to the exits. And who knows what kind of rush to other exits it could inspire.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/exit-sign/feed/531http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/exit-sign/The Old Songshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/U5wgNhZAilI/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-old-songs/#commentsFri, 24 Nov 2017 14:27:08 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8641Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! What if the fun and games of 2017 are over? The hidden message behind the sexual harassment freak show of recent weeks is that nothing else is sufficiently serious to occupy the nation’s attention. We’re living in the Year of Suspended more »

What if the fun and games of 2017 are over? The hidden message behind the sexual harassment freak show of recent weeks is that nothing else is sufficiently serious to occupy the nation’s attention. We’re living in the Year of Suspended Reality, stuck in the sideshow and missing the three-ring circus next door in the big tent.

It probably all comes down to money. Money represents the mojo to keep on keeping on, and there is probably nothing more unreal in American life these days than the way we measure our money — literally, what it’s worth, and what everything related to it is worth. So there is nothing more unreal in our national life than the idea that it’s possible to keep on keeping on as we do.

The weeks ahead may be most illuminating on this score. The debt ceiling suspension runs out on December 8, around the same time that the tax reform question will resolve one way or another. The debt ceiling means that the treasury can’t issue any more bonds, bills, or notes. That is, it can’t borrow any more money to pretend the government can keep running. Normally these days (and it’s really very abnormal), the treasury pawns off paper IOUs to the Federal Reserve and the Fed makes digital entries on various account ledgers that purport to be “money.” And, by the way, the Fed is a consortium of private banks not a department of government — which is surely one of a thousand ways that the public is confused and deceived about what condition our condition is in, as the old song goes.

There’s a fair chance that congress may not be able to resolve the debt ceiling deadline. The votes may just not be there. If the deadline comes and goes, the treasury can only use incoming tax revenues to cover its costs, and it won’t be enough. It will have to choose whether it issues paychecks to the roughly 2.7 million US government employees, or pays the vendors that sell things like warplanes to the military, or pay out so-called entitlements like Medicare and SNAP cards, or pay the interest on the previously-issued bonds, debts, and bills that the US has racked up over the years. Believe it or not, making those interest payments is probably the top priority, because failing to do that would shove the nation officially into default for the first time and destroy the country’s credit standing. The full faith and credit in the US dollar would shatter.

And then the fun and games would really cease. The country would discover it doesn’t have its mojo working, as another old song goes. The reality of being truly broke will set in. After all, there are two basic ways of going broke as a nation: you can run out of money; or you can have plenty of money that is worthless. Take your pick.

There is some kind of revolution coming to American life. One way or another, it amounts to a much lower standard of living. The journey there may take the public by surprise, a la Ernest Hemingway’s crack about how a character in one of his stories went broke: slowly, and then all at once. The main question about this journey must be whether it is accompanied by political violence. One would have to think the potential for that is pretty high, given levels of animosity and delusional thinking among the two opposing factions — can we even call them Left and Right anymore? — which may even exceed the ill-feeling of 1861.

The tax reform bill, whether it lives or dies, may only become a laughable footnote to the greater quandary of national insolvency. And, anyway, the proposals so far amount to a hall of mirrors inside a three-card-monte house of horrors that almost nobody really understands. As yet another old song says, this ain’t no Mud Club… this ain’t no foolin’ around. Meanwhile, down in the rococo dining room of Mar a Lago, the Golden Golem of Greatness tweeted yesterday that he was presiding over the greatest stock market ever! Kind of reminds me of the moment that old Joe Kennedy got a stock tip from his shoeshine boy.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-old-songs/feed/288http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-old-songs/Transparentlyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/bvb845mgowo/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/transparently/#commentsMon, 20 Nov 2017 14:41:18 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8630Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! As long as sexual hysteria is the order of the day, there was juicy item stowed on the back blue pages of The New York Times this morning. They report that actor Jeffrey Tambor is leaving the title role in Amazon’s more »

As long as sexual hysteria is the order of the day, there was juicy item stowed on the back blue pages of The New York Times this morning. They report that actor Jeffrey Tambor is leaving the title role in Amazon’s hit TV series Transparent after two women on the set accused him of sexual misconduct.

One was “actress” Trace Lysette (notice The Times reverting to the antiquated gendered term when the new correct mode is to use “actor” for all on-camera persons). The other victim was Mr. Tambor’s on-set assistant, Van Barnes.

“My back was against the wall in a corner as Jeffrey approached me,” Ms. Lysette said in her statement on Thursday. “He came in close, put his bare feet on top of mine so I could not move, leaned his body against me and began quick, discreet thrusts back and forth against my body. I felt his penis on my hip through his thin pajamas, and I pushed him off of me.”

Mr. Tambor was only accused of “groping” Van Barnes. We’re informed near the end of the story that both victims are transgender women, that is, men who went through some kind of medical procedure to present as women.

Hollywood was especially proud of the transgressive series for pioneering TV programming into the new frontier of transsexual manners and mores, something America really needed to know about. The show was showered with awards. Its creator, Jill Soloway — who “identifies as non-binary,” and refers to herself with the pronoun “they” in their relations with the media — has said that they hope to use the series to explore ideas of gender identity through a “wounded father being replaced by a blossoming femininity.”

Well, I guess that sort of does say it all about the fundamental state of American culture these days. We are living in the land of the wounded father. The nature of his wound is not quite specified, but if one were to guess, one might venture that something happened to his testicles. Cut off? Shot off? Industrial accident? We’re not informed. But the remedy for that misfortune is to turn into a woman, or at least act like one.

An interesting angle on all this from, say, a zeitgeist point of view, is that the archetypal father is not missed. Society does not need him. Rather we need him to go through the mystical passage to become a tragic-comic mother figure, a harmless old vessel full of rueful wisdom and comic relief. Of course that is the message that has been coming through loud and clear in the cultural scripts of recent days, with all the carping about cis-gender white folks (i.e. men) being responsible for all the woes of humanity.

My own meta-take on this whole business is that the archetypal father is secretly rather sorely missed in the USA. The mental inversions of the Progressive intelligentsia tell me that, deep down, the Left is in a state of deranged anguish over it. Trump has inflamed them especially because he fills the role of national father so badly for them with his vulgar incoherence. Nothing he does reassures anybody. They are desperate to shove him off-stage. He only reminds them how badly they miss a real and proper daddy. And their rage about it prompts them to destroy anybody else who reminds them of a bad daddy, by any means necessary — sexual misbehavior being a very convenient means in a culture that celebrates its lack of boundaries.

Lately, male authority in America has gone along with this script, perhaps (I have to guess) because they have screwed up public affairs so royally — especially the financial management of the national household — and they are deeply ashamed. So they have been willing to submit, at least, to a certain amount of symbolic castration to avoid having to act differently, or actually accomplish anything on the nation’s pretty long to-do list.

This psychodrama is not going to continue indefinitely. At some point the men in this country who are not Trump are going to rediscover that they have a purpose and even an obligation to act like men. But it will be interesting to see how the Transparent TV show continues into Season Four minus the character that is its reason to exist. The fact that the producers seem to think they can just carry on as if nothing happened tells us a lot about the delusional thinking of Hollywood.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/transparently/feed/442http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/transparently/Another One Bites the Dusthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/63EMe5TtQjw/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/another-one-bites-dust/#commentsFri, 17 Nov 2017 14:28:22 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8627Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! If only abortion were retroactive, we could suitably deal with monsters like Senator Al Franken (D – MN), who apparently ventured to apply a breast adjustment to a female colleague asleep on the military airplane winging them home from USO duty more »

If only abortion were retroactive, we could suitably deal with monsters like Senator Al Franken (D – MN), who apparently ventured to apply a breast adjustment to a female colleague asleep on the military airplane winging them home from USO duty in Afghanistan. This was back in the day when Senator Franken was a professional entertainer, a clown to be precise, but his career shift to politics has rendered all his prior clowning anathema.

Will he slink out of the senate in disgrace with (ahem) his tail between his legs? Or will he bunker in and wait until the mega-storm of sexual accusation roars on to strand some bigger, flashier fish on the shoals of ignominy? Perhaps we’ll soon learn that Warren Buffet repeatedly shagged his notoriously over-taxed secretary in the Berkshire Hathaway janitor’s closet. Or that Mike Pence once bought a diet Dr. Pepper for a woman who was not his wife!

Seems to me this storm could roar and roil on until ninety-plus percent of the men in America are exposed as sex monsters and expelled from every workplace in the land. And then America can feel good about itself again. At least until the bond market blows up, or Kim Jung Fatboy sends a rocket over Rancho Cuckamonga.

But in the meantime, this scourging of male wickedness raises some interesting questions about human dynamics vis-a-vis workplace dynamics. I (for one, apparently) find it amusing that people are shocked to learn that sexual favors are swapped for career advancement in show business, where sheer narcissism buys more than Bitcoin. The remedy, I suppose, will be to put an end to show business — except its doing a pretty good job of accomplishing that itself, especially the art-form formerly known as the movies. But what about the gazillion other less-glamorous business activities out there: the actuarial suites, the dental offices, the WalMart middle management departments?

I would begin with the recognition that human sexuality is a pretty potent and mischievous component of basic biology. In, say, the much maligned “cis” world of gender relations, people in the workplace surely feel a fairly constant cognitive tug of awareness that they are in the presence of the opposite sex. If nothing else, there is the pheromone thing: the involuntary wafting about of hormonal chemicals that signal sexual possibility, though not necessarily opportunity. It may be considered primitive and inconvenient, but it’s there anyway.

That being so, one obvious question is: what happened to manners, the once-conventional device for managing impulse control. Narcissism does explain a lot, since that mental state prompts the treatment of other people as mere objects of utility rather than persons on a transect of mutual respect. But in the new sexual harassment workplace regime, a mere polite inquiry of romantic interest might provoke punishment, so that even an unmarried true gentleman asking a female co-worker out for a drink after work might be construed as a firing offense.

Offendedness has gone viral in America these days. The rewards are a pretty sure thing for the offendee, ranging from simple brownie points to the offendedness powerball lottery of a $32 million payoff for getting seriously roughed up by a wealthy mug such as Bill O’Reilly. My guess is that the suppression of even gentlemanly approaches to women only pushes things to that darker and harsher edge of the gradient of male behavior, where the latent chimpanzee lurks.

It’s inconceivable to me that we are going to eliminate sexual mischief on-the-job as long as men and women are mixed together in work that can be done by anybody. The situation would be less toxic if genuine misbehavior was reported to bosses or to the police directly, instead of waiting twenty years to call up MSNBC, and if asking for a date, or proffering a compliment, were not treated as vile and inexcusable.

Of course, once all the predators are cleaned out of the corporate C-suites, we’ll still be stuck with a spectacularly trashy contemporary culture, saturated with inducements for all kinds of theoretically decent people to behave badly. Mainly what’s being accomplished in the current hysteria is reinforcement of the idea that the weaker sex is just that, but with a raging denial that they require some kind of protection.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/another-one-bites-dust/feed/329http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/another-one-bites-dust/What Now?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/C5JidBwJwr4/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-now-2/#commentsMon, 13 Nov 2017 15:00:53 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8619Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! It must be exciting to wake up on a gilded bed somewhere in Riyadh and realize that you are Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, mover and shaker of Middle East order. Actually, exciting just to have woken up at all. more »

It must be exciting to wake up on a gilded bed somewhere in Riyadh and realize that you are Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, mover and shaker of Middle East order. Actually, exciting just to have woken up at all. Perhaps Prince MBS checks to make sure that there aren’t seventy-two virgins in the room before he rises to prayers, state business, and the prospect of World War Three.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has been a giant gasoline bomb waiting to explode for decades. It occupies one of the geographically least hospitable corners of the earth. Its existence as a modern (cough cough) state relies strictly on the reserves of oil discovered as recently as the late 1930s, that is, within the lifetime of people still reading this blog. The oil supply is in steep decline, and so, of course, is the stability of the kingdom.

Politically, it’s a super-medieval operation, an absolute monarchy tied to a severe religious order with the law floating precariously between the two, and old-fashioned customs such as the public beheading of criminals (for misdeeds such as “adultery,” “atheism,” and “sorcery”). The Saud clan has controlled the throne all these years, and its grip on power is slipping as the country itself slips into the prospective next era of its history, minus the endless gusher of oil that has made its existence possible — hence, a true existential crisis without the usual pseudo-intellectual bullshit.

How are they going to support the thirty or forty million people who will still be there when the oil exports dribble down? Most of the work done in the country is performed by foreign “guests.” The indigenous folk don’t even remember how to milk a camel, let alone run routine maintenance on a desalinization plant. (And what are you going to run the de-sal plant on when the oil runs down?) These are questions that must drive thoughtful Saudi royalty mad.

Hence, the Kingdom is going mad. The current king, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, is the latest in a line of geriatric monarchs. His brother and predecessor, Abdullah, spent his last years in a limbo of medical life-support (virgins standing by), and Salman is reputed to be dotty. Crown Prince MBS has assumed more of the king’s duties by necessity, but the land is filled with thousands of other princes, many of them frustrated, angry, and jealous of the Crown Prince’s prerogatives.

One can only imagine the clouds of intrigue wafting through the ornate corridors of wealth and power. Crown Prince MBS is lately out to deprive his many royal rivals of those two critical assets, and a couple of said rival princes — Abdul Aziz bin Fahd and Mansour bin Muqrin — were offed altogether (gunfight, helicopter crash) two weeks back. A score of non-royal public officials and business poobahs have also been arrested, including top ministers (Finance, Economy & Planning), the former CEO of the national airline, and a brother of Osama bin Laden, whose family ran the country’s biggest construction company.

It really amounts to a nascent civil war and it comes around at exactly the moment that the Kingdom’s arch-enemy, Iran, is feeling comfortably aggressive. Iran, formerly known as Persia, is a much sturdier old polity that has been around long before there was much ado about oil. They were fighting the ancient Greeks and Romans back in the day, and won a few rounds. But, of course, Iran has a good deal of oil, too. And having pissed off the Americans not so long ago by overrunning the US embassy and all, our country has been striving to punish them ever since — especially making it difficult for them to sell oil to our “friends” in Europe. As it happens, there are plenty of customers elsewhere for Iran’s oil — and, yes, they will eventually face their own depletion problems, but they do have the world’s largest untapped reserve stash next door in Iraq, which they are steadily and increasingly coming to control. And they do have that millennium-and-a-half beef with Arabia’s Sunni branch of Islam headquartered in KSA.

Crown Prince MBS may see war as a unifying theme for his domestic difficulties. He has a fifty-plus years’ stock of American war toys that have hardly been used — except for turning neighboring Yemen into a landfill. The USA has been KSA’s staunch ally all these years, and MBS has every reason to believe we have his back, as Iran probably believes Russia has its back. And then there is Israel in the background with its nuclear-armed subs… Israel, which actually took seriously Iran’s declaration a few years ago to wipe it off the face of the earth — and which now much of the world castigates Israel for so doing.

And in the middle of all this, poor, feckless, Hezbollah-haunted Lebanon, and the boneyard formerly known as Syria. The region is seriously coming apart. Someone is going to make a dangerous misstep. The Golden Golem of Greatness has been off far away sampling General Tsao’s chicken and Singapore noodles. And this country is completely preoccupied with Sex Among the Stars. Thank goodness the stock market only goes up.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-now-2/feed/432http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-now-2/Spanking the Monkeyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/_6wdKqWTrH4/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/spanking-the-monkey/#commentsFri, 10 Nov 2017 13:54:18 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8608Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! The hysteria manufacturing business formerly known as the news media is enjoying multiple orgasms this morning in the outing of notoriously vulgar comedian Louis CK for exactly the sort of vulgar behavior offstage that he riffed about onstage. What a surprise. more »

The hysteria manufacturing business formerly known as the news media is enjoying multiple orgasms this morning in the outing of notoriously vulgar comedian Louis CK for exactly the sort of vulgar behavior offstage that he riffed about onstage. What a surprise. We also learn today that Jeremy Piven, beloved and admired for his role as a bimbo-berating Hollywood agent in the HBO comedy Entourage, is alleged to have groped a starlet in his trailer. Or was he just doggedly staying in character between set-ups? And what was she doing there, anyway? Stopping by to share the everything bagel with jalapeño cream cheese that she picked up at craft services?

I suppose these guys will be joining Kevin Spacey in his new dinner theater in Tampa, since they’ll never work in Hollywood again, and surely they have bills to pay, especially to their lawyers. Hollywood itself, being the vulgar place it has always been, must be nervously awaiting the inevitable next phase of this melodrama: when various actresses, and other women around the biz, are revealed to be sluts who screwed and blew their way to stardom — not to put too fine a point on it. Surely a few ladies out there have misbehaved in the way that ladies can, trading favors for fame and fortune — or do you suppose that never happens? Or only when men force them to? (Anyway, don’t count on hearing about that in The New York Times.)

Then the whole prurient cavalcade of cross-allegation and litigation will be as forgotten as a mass slaughter in Las Vegas, or Texas, or Lower Manhattan, and it will be back to business-as-usual in the news racket: nattering about contacts with Russia, a faraway land that, we’re told, is determined to corrupt the morals of our shining city on a hill.

The metamorphosis of the news business from a dignified and necessary component of the public interest to a gong and geek show is now complete. Some of you may remember that it used to be the task of news organizations to actually gather the news from far and wide. When Walter Cronkite came over the airways on CBS news, he “anchored” the revolving team of reporters in the field: we go to Marvin Kalb in Moscow… Fred Graham in Atlanta… Peter Kalischer in Paris… Lesley Stahl in New York…. Do you know what those people were doing? They were reporting the news on site, because it was important to actually be in the places where events were happening and talking to the people involved in them. And, by the way, do you think Marvin Kalb made contact with Russians? Or perhaps reported on other fellow Americans in contact with Russians? (And that was back in the Cold War, when Russia was run by the wicked Boris and Natasha).

Turn on Anderson Cooper on CNN these days and what do you get: “And now lets turn to our panel for analysis.” Our panel? Analysis? A gang of moonlighting kibitzers with an opinion about what might have actually happened in the world that day, which none of them have been busy actually reporting on. The transformation on the cable networks especially has been insidious. Not so distantly as the days of the Iraq War, CNN checked in every night with Christiane Amanpour, the last of the great foreign correspondents, roving about the Middle East. Do these so-called news organizations even employ any reporters anymore?

I don’t think so. Perhaps the most important story of the decade is the developing meltdown of governance and authority in Saudi Arabia and a Defcon Red level of potential for major war breaking out between them and Iran. How many reporters do the cable networks have in Riyadh today? What’s on CNN’s home page this morning? Boy dies after eating grilled cheese; Why men use masturbation to harass women; and the lead under their “Top Stories” banner: ‘Magnum, P.I.’ actor John Hillerman dies. Maybe you can find a clue in here why the USA has become a reality-optional society. Maybe it’s the American news media that actually has its dick in its hand.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/spanking-the-monkey/feed/296http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/spanking-the-monkey/What Could Go Wrong?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/dzCTbZTQjQM/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-could-go-wrong/#commentsMon, 06 Nov 2017 14:25:08 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8601Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! Everybody and his uncle, and his uncle’s mother’s uncle, believes that the stock markets will be zooming to new record highs this week, and probably so, because it is the time of year to fatten up, just as the Thanksgiving turkeys more »

Everybody and his uncle, and his uncle’s mother’s uncle, believes that the stock markets will be zooming to new record highs this week, and probably so, because it is the time of year to fatten up, just as the Thanksgiving turkeys are happily fattening up — prior to their mass slaughter.

President Trump’s new Federal Reserve chair, Jerome “Jay” Powell, “a low interest-rate kind of guy,” was obviously picked because he is Janet Yellen minus testicles, the grayest of gray go-along Fed go-fers, going about his life-long errand-boy duties in the thickets of financial lawyerdom like a bustling little rodent girdling the trunks of every living shrub on behalf of the asset-stripping business that is private equity (eight years with the Deep State-ish Carlyle Group) while subsisting on the rich insect life in the leaf litter below his busy little paws.

Powell’s contribution to the discourse of finance was his famous utterance that the lack of inflation is “kind of a mystery.” Oh, yes, indeed, a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery dropped in a doggie bag with half a pastrami sandwich. Unless you consider that all the “money” pumped out of the Fed and the world’s other central banks flows through a hose to only two destinations: the bond and stock markets, where this hot-air-like “money” inflates zeppelin-sized bubbles that have no relation to on-the-ground economies where real people have to make things and trade things.

Powell might have gone a bit further and declared contemporary finance itself “a mystery,” because it has been engineered deliberately so by the equivalent of stage magicians devising ever more astounding ruses, deceptions, and mis-directions as they enjoy sure-thing revenue streams their magic tricks generate. This is vulgarly known as “the rich getting richer.” The catch is, they’re getting richer on revenue streams of pure air, and there is a lot of perilous distance between the air they’re suspended in and the hard ground below.

Powell noted that the economy is growing robustly and unemployment is supernaturally low. Like his colleagues and auditors in the investment banking community, he’s just making this shit up. As the late Joseph Goebbels used to say describing his misinformation technique, if you’re going to lie, make sure it’s a whopper.

The economy isn’t growing and can’t grow. The economy is a revenant of something that used to exist, an industrial economy that has rolled over and died and come back as a moldy ghoul feeding on the ghostly memories of itself. Stocks go up because the unprecedented low interest rates established by the Fed allow company CEOs to “lever-up” issuing bonds (i.e. borrow “money” from, cough cough, “investors”) and then use the borrowed “money” to buy back their own stock to raise the share value, so they can justify their companies’ boards-of-directors jacking up their salaries and bonuses — based on the ghost of the idea that higher stock prices represent the creation of more actual things of value (front-end-loaders, pepperoni sticks, oil drilling rigs).

The economy is actually contracting because we can’t afford the energy it takes to run the things we do — mostly just driving around — and unemployment is not historically low, it’s simply mis-represented by not including the tens of millions of people who have dropped out of the work force. And an epic wickedness combined with cowardice drives the old legacy news business to look the other way and concoct its good times “narrative.” If any of the reporters at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal really understand the legerdemain at work in these “mysteries” of finance, they’re afraid to say. The companies they work for are dying, like so many other enterprises in the non-financial realm of the used-to-be economy, and they don’t want to be out of paycheck until the lights finally go out.

The “narrative” is firmest before it its falseness is proved by the turn of events, and there are an awful lot of events out there waiting to present, like debutantes dressing for a winter ball. The debt ceiling… North Korea… Mueller… Hillarygate….the state pension funds….That so many agree the USA has entered a permanent plateau of exquisite prosperity is a sure sign of its imminent implosion. What could go wrong?

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-could-go-wrong/feed/625http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-could-go-wrong/Swamp-O-Ramahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/IQ9Vidru_SA/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/swamp-o-rama/#commentsFri, 03 Nov 2017 13:32:34 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8594Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! What America might want to know right now is: how come Hillary Clinton doesn’t have any legal problems? Why aren’t DOJ investigators examining the financial records of the Clinton Foundation? You would think somebody would want to find out how over more »

What America might want to know right now is: how come Hillary Clinton doesn’t have any legal problems? Why aren’t DOJ investigators examining the financial records of the Clinton Foundation? You would think somebody would want to find out how over $120 million of Russian “charitable donations” ended up on its ledgers around the time that Secretary of State HRC approved the Uranium One deal — compared to which, Bill Clinton’s $500,000 payment from a Russian bank for giving a speech around the same time just looks like walking-around money.

This is not to mention (well, I will) the flow of donations from Saudi Arabia pending approval of a major arms deal by HRC. Or of myriad other donations from foreign nationals tendered simply for face-time with the Secretary. Has any other cabinet officer in US history run a money-gathering org while serving? I don’t think so. Maybe the arrant selling of influence right out-front strains the credulity of government auditors. And while we’re at this, I would like to know how then-FBI director Robert Mueller and President Obama might have been informed about these activities. Or not?

Mr. Mueller also needs to answer about his relationship with former FBI director James Comey — he was apparently Mr. Comey’s mentor — while Mr. Comey needs to answer for his peculiar and probably lawless behavior in dismissing the investigation around HRC’s private email server — that was not his decision to make — and the notorious meeting at the Phoenix airport of former president Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch around the same time the email investigation under Mr. Comey came to a head.

Now comes the news from Donna Brazille, on-again-off-again Democrat Party chair, that the primary elections were elaborately rigged by HRC functionaries to buy control of her nomination. Let’s not even go into the bidding for the Christopher Steele “dossier” alleging kinky sexual romps in Moscow by Donald Trump, or the activities in Ukraine of Tony Podesta’s DC lobbying company — that’s Tony, brother of John Podesta, Clinton campaign chief, whose emails remain a truffle cache for the rooting dogs of the DOJ, if they were actually on-the-task.

I write this as a still-registered Democrat myself — though I consider myself their enemy now, yet hardly a Trump partisan. Are there any like me out there who would like to see both parties tossed onto the garbage barge of history? Of course, to say that also means throwing out a cargo of terrible ideas and beliefs, not just two clown cars of personalities. Identity politics, zero interest rate policy, American Exceptionalism, endless debt, nation-building in foreign lands, FASB-157, sanctuary cities, Title IX coercion, racketeering in health care and higher ed, market interventions, ambiguous borders… is just some of the cargo that needs to be dumped overboard with both parties.

Watergate begins to look as quaint and simple as a game of Chutes and Ladders compared to RussiaGate. Not only are both parties implicated one way or another in multiple nefarious schemes, plots, and intrigues, but the Department of Justice and its subsidiary, the FBI, look culpable in a range of cover-ups and mis-directions. If the DOJ becomes disabled, how does any of this get resolved?

The whole extravaganza is heading toward a constitutional crisis that might clean out the system like a Death Wish coffee enema. Sentiment may arise for Mr. Mueller to step aside, if President Trump doesn’t make the rash decision to simply fire him. The latter would certainly foment a constitutional crisis that could include an effort to run Trump over with the 25th amendment. In the event, we’ll be in a new kind of civil war.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/swamp-o-rama/feed/328http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/swamp-o-rama/November 2017http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/lPLgudixEVU/
http://kunstler.com/eyesore-of-the-month/november-2017/#commentsWed, 01 Nov 2017 14:46:40 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8585Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! Behold the “Dubai Frame,” a lavish, gilded adornment for the tourist mecca, business hub, and glistening pearl of of the Middle East, scheduled to open this month! The vanity project of the emir’s Emaar development company, designed by Mexican architect Fernando Donis, stands 50 stories high and is expected more »

Behold the “Dubai Frame,” a lavish, gilded adornment for the tourist mecca, business hub, and glistening pearl of of the Middle East, scheduled to open this month! The vanity project of the emir’s Emaar development company, designed by Mexican architect Fernando Donis, stands 50 stories high and is expected to attract two million visitors a year to gawk at the distant Dubai skyline. They say that cultures build their most outlandish monuments just before they tank, and this one perhaps exceeds in preposterousness the earlier humdinger known as the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building in the world. The fate of these pop-up desert metroplexes is tied to the declining oil wealth of the Arabian peninsula, and so the coming collapse of kingdoms and emirates is as plain as the moon and the stars. Wait for it….

Below, the Frame nearing the end of construction. (Yes, it’s for real!) Thanks to Derek Markovic for the nomination!

]]>http://kunstler.com/eyesore-of-the-month/november-2017/feed/7http://kunstler.com/eyesore-of-the-month/november-2017/Thar She Blows!http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/scK-8gVYjoY/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/thar-she-blows/#commentsMon, 30 Oct 2017 12:59:17 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8578Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! I’m obliged to file this blog before Robert Mueller’s office releases the name of the first winner in the Russian Election Meddling tribunal indictment lottery. Most of the betting is on Paul Manafort, the Swamp-creature-fixer-lobbyist-grifter who spent his summer vacation of more »

I’m obliged to file this blog before Robert Mueller’s office releases the name of the first winner in the Russian Election Meddling tribunal indictment lottery. Most of the betting is on Paul Manafort, the Swamp-creature-fixer-lobbyist-grifter who spent his summer vacation of 2016 managing Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Before that unfortunate summer internship, Manafort was just a shadier-than-average influence-peddler. It happened that many of his clients were bigshots in foreign lands — Mobuto Sese Seko (Congo), Jonas Savimbi (Angola), and Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), as well as interests in Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ukraine, and other world beauty spots. Also, most notably, Russia where the wicked Mr. Putin dwells and incessantly plots evil against our shining city of a republic.

Over the years, Manafort took large sums of money to the DC laundry room and then distributed bales of it around town to other lobbyist subcontractors, but he left quite a trail. And he overlooked the requirement to register as an agent for foreign interests. So, indicting him looks like a no-brainer. An entry-level US Attorney could, figuratively speaking, hitch him up to the rear bumper of a Chevy Yukon and drag him over five miles of broken Coke bottles.

If I am right, his indictment will provoke a five-column headline in The New York Times, Don Lemon will have a multiple orgasm on CNN tonight, and by Halloween the whole Manafort matter will be as forgotten as Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Las Vegas Country Music Massacre. That’s how we roll in Attention Deficit Nation. I suppose Mueller’s team next will want to charge fired National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn for failing to register as a foreign agent prior to a having conversation with the Russian ambassador — but mightn’t it be a little absurd to outlaw dialogue between incoming White House officials and foreign ambassadors who, after all, are here to have conversations with our people? That’ll be an interesting precedent. Why would other countries even bother to send an ambassador here if that’s our policy?

There’s an outside chance, of course — outside, say as far away as the planet Mars — that Mr. Mueller will just flop his whole hand on the table and indict President Trump. Wouldn’t that be a jolt? And it would instantly prompt a constitutional crisis, so my money says ain’t gonna happen.

It’s hard to see where it goes from there. The standard plot-line is to net these smaller fish and use them as bait to harpoon the Big White Whale. Give them immunity and let them sing their hearts out to avoid getting sent to ping-pong camp in the Poconos for a five-year stretch. Or else these two schnooks go bankrupt paying hotshot DC lawyers to get them off the hook. Does Mueller go after Donny Junior for having a conversation with a Russian lawyer? Or son-in-law Jared Kushner for flying to Russia and having meetings with Russians? Hey, does anyone remember that A) We’re not at war with Russia, and B) the soviet regime there folded up twenty-five years ago?

The casual observer can’t avoid dragging Hillary into this. It appears that, among other things, the Clinton Foundation received over a $100 million in “charitable donations” from various Russian companies and individuals over the years. Gosh, they’re a big-hearted people! Maybe it’s all the vodka they guzzle. No doubt, the newly-converted Russian capitalists were yearning to support “impact entrepreneurs” who are creating “new enterprises to generate both social impact and financial returns” by addressing market gaps in developing countries, or to “strengthen the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence” — as the Clinton Foundation described their activities.

More likely they wanted to grease their access to the sure-thing It’s-My-Turn Madam President. Except then she went and lost the election… all because of Russian meddling.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/thar-she-blows/feed/316http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/thar-she-blows/The Informant Comethhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/qk5mczblq48/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-informant-cometh/#commentsFri, 27 Oct 2017 13:58:36 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8548Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! When you consider all the shadowy creatures scuttling around the backstage interstices of the Deep State, it’s a little wondrous that someone like this hasn’t stepped into the light before. Apparently now, a person whose name will soon be plastered across more »

When you consider all the shadowy creatures scuttling around the backstage interstices of the Deep State, it’s a little wondrous that someone like this hasn’t stepped into the light before. Apparently now, a person whose name will soon be plastered across the pixel-verse, has been given clearance by the Justice Department to come forth and sing to the various house and senate committees about a fishy deal involving Russia and the Clinton dynasty.

The broad outlines of Uranium-Gate are already loaded like a platter of nachos grandes with piquant tidbits of suspicious detail. The informant worked for a DC Swamp lobbying firm that was hired by Tenex, a subsidiary of the Russian government-owned company Rosatom, to grease the skids for a deal to buy a Canadian company, Uranium One, which had substantial mining operations in the USA. According to The Hill website, the deal put about 20 percent of US uranium into the hands of the Russian company.

The informant recognized evidence of criminal behavior in the dealings he witnessed and voluntarily went to the FBI with it. TheHill report goes on:

His work helped the Justice Department secure convictions against Russia’s top commercial nuclear executive in the United States, a Russian financier in New Jersey, and the head of a U.S. uranium trucking company in what prosecutors said was a long-running racketeering scheme involving bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering.

Those charges, based on evidence gathered in 2009, were not taken to court until 2014. And that was supposed to be the end of it.

Now, it also happens that the deal for Tenex to buy Uranium One had to be approved by nine federal agencies and signed off on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which she did shortly after her husband Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow sponsored by a Russian bank. The Clinton Foundation also received millions of dollars in “charitable” donations from parties with an interest in the Tenex / Uranium One deal. It happened, too, that the CEO of Uranium One at the time of the Tenex sale, Frank Guistra, was one of eleven board members of the Clinton Foundation.

The informant remained undercover for the FBI for five years. None of the Clinton involvement was included in the previously mentioned federal bribery and racketeering prosecutions. Meanwhile, the informant had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the Obama Justice Department, only just lifted last week.

As of this morning, the story is absent from The New York Times, formerly the nation’s newspaper of record. The FBI’s credibility is at stake in this case. Robert Mueller, who was Director of the agency during the Tenex /Uranium One deal, with all its Clintonian-Russian undertones, is in the peculiar position now as special prosecutor for the Russian election “meddling” alleged to involve President Trump. Whatever that investigation has turned up is not known publicly yet, but the massive leaking from government employees that turned the story into roughly 80 percent of mainstream legacy news coverage the past year, has ceased — either because Mueller has imposed Draconian restraints on his own staff, or because there is nothing there.

The FBI has a lot to answer for in overlooking the Clinton connection to the Uranium One deal. The informant, soon to be attached to a name and a face, is coming in from the cold, to the warm, wainscoted chambers of the house and senate committees. I wonder if Mr. Trump, or his lawyers, will find grounds to attempt to dismiss Special Prosecutor Mueller, given what looks like Mueller’s compromised position vis-à-vis Trump’s election opponent, HRC. It’s hard to not see this thing going a long way — at the same time that financial markets and geopolitical matters are heading south. Keep your hats on.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-informant-cometh/feed/276http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-informant-cometh/KunstlerCast 296 — The College Loan Crisis with Richard Fosseyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/PRUtV-IQfIE/
http://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast-296-college-loan-crisis-richard-fossey/#commentsWed, 25 Oct 2017 21:00:59 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8509Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Richard Fossey is the author of Student Loan Catastrophe: Postcards from the Rubble, published in September, 2017. He’s the Paul Burdin Endowed Professor of Education at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He received his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and his doctorate more »

Richard Fossey is the author of Student Loan Catastrophe: Postcards from the Rubble, published in September, 2017. He’s the Paul Burdin Endowed Professor of Education at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He received his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and his doctorate in education policy from Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research concentrates on the student loan crisis; and much of his work is focused on student loans and the federal bankruptcy courts. He is an active blogger on the student loan crisis. His blog sit can be accessed at condemnedtodebt.org

]]>http://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast-296-college-loan-crisis-richard-fossey/feed/5http://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast-296-college-loan-crisis-richard-fossey/Down With Sex!http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/KwDlRjKHJ1Y/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/down-with-sex/#commentsMon, 23 Oct 2017 13:20:42 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8502Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! It’s interesting to see how, in a culture so pornified that any nine-year-old can watch sex acts on-screen all the live-long day, we discover that decorum is absent in American life. This, at the same time that the more Gnostic political more »

It’s interesting to see how, in a culture so pornified that any nine-year-old can watch sex acts on-screen all the live-long day, we discover that decorum is absent in American life. This, at the same time that the more Gnostic political Leftists want to transform human nature by erasing sexual categories in their quest to create a utopia of hermaphrodites.

Sex is bothersome, you know. It comes between people literally and rather awkwardly, and it is fraught with tensions so primitive that it can frighten and shame us. Is it any wonder that these tensions will manifest in a workplace where men and women spend their waking hours? Are you really surprised that sexual attraction is a currency for advancement? That it tends toward the naked exchange of favors?

I’d submit that the wreck of Harvey Weinstein is a dramatic representation of collapse of the movie industry as we’ve known for nearly a century. The two-hour motion picture exhibited in a large room with a lot of seats is in its death throes. It joins the long-playing album of recorded music and the book-length literary exercise called the novel in the elephants’ graveyard of art-forms. The fall of HW is just the period at the end of the sentence.

The past month has been a bloodbath for the theatrical release of movies. Supposed blockbusters are being pulled from the empty cineplexes like guest speakers from the college lecture halls. The struggling middle-class doesn’t need movie theaters anymore, and the flat-screens at home enable them to get lost in whole fictional worlds that grind on in weekly episodes year after year like so much bratwurst. Who knows how long that phase of show biz will last. In evolution, remember, the climactic form of an organism is often supersized. Think: Baluchitherium, titan of the Oligocene land mammals. (And imagine sex between two creatures the size of tractor-trailer trucks!) The fate of television “content” like Game of Thrones probably depends on the fitness of an electric grid that is looking pretty sclerotic these days. Personally, I think the show-biz of the future will tend toward puppet shows.

Fortunately (or maybe not, depending on your political ideology) sex will still be with us, and its eternal tensions with it. What is more subject to change is the division of labor. Most adults I know accept it as axiomatic that social changes they’ve seen in their lifetime have become permanent installations in the human condition. That was Tom Friedman’s “narrative” about globalism, which is now fracturing and withering. The same is true of the Gnostic Leftists, who believe they are on a trajectory to exterminate the detested cissexist heteropatriarchy. How do you suppose things will work out in a nation of eunuchs and trannies?

You’ll be surprised, perhaps, at how not permanent these trends may be. The decadent USA, lacking discipline and decorum, lost in raptures of grandiose techno-narcissism, broadcasting its twerked-up gangsta fantasies while it sucks finished goods from other lands in exchange for janky bonded debt, is becoming the international pariah. It’s a good bet that the tensions arising out of that dynamic will, one way or another, provoke the blow-up of the trade and financial systems that nourished the phase of history now passing — with plenty of collateral damage in all the other realms of daily life.

In the meantime, America sinks into a swamp of sexual excess, sexual preoccupation, sexual confusion, sexual recrimination, and sexual remorse. The one thing that none of the combatants can agree on is what might pass for sexual normality. The very notion would be taken for a war-cry.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/down-with-sex/feed/487http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/down-with-sex/Into the Cold and Darkhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/Dzqv8ks_QP4/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/into-the-cold-and-dark/#commentsFri, 20 Oct 2017 13:27:02 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8490Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! It amuses me that the nation is so caught up in the sexual mischief of a single Hollywood producer when the nation as a whole is getting fucked sideways and upside down by its own political caretakers. Behind all the smoke, more »

It amuses me that the nation is so caught up in the sexual mischief of a single Hollywood producer when the nation as a whole is getting fucked sideways and upside down by its own political caretakers.

Behind all the smoke, mirrors, Trump bluster, Schumer fog, and media mystification about the vaudeville act known as The Budget and The Tax Cut, both political parties are fighting for their lives and the Deep State knows that it is being thrown overboard to drown in red ink. There’s really no way out of the financial conundrum that dogs the republic and something’s got to give.

Many of us have been waiting for these tensions to express themselves by blowing up the artificially levitated stock markets. For about a year, absolutely nothing has thwarted their supernatural ascent, including the threat of World War Three, leading some observers to believe that they have been rigged to perfection. Well, the algo-bots might be pretty fine-tuned, and the central bank inputs of fresh “liquidity” pretty much assured, but for all that, these markets are still human artifacts and Murphy’s Law still lurks out there in the gloaming with its cohorts, the diminishing returns of technology (a.k.a. “Blowback”), and the demon of unintended consequences.

Many, including yours truly, have expected the distortions and perversions on the money side of life to express themselves in money itself: the dollar. So far, it has only wobbled down about ten percent. This is due perhaps to the calibrated disinformation known as “forward guidance” issued by this country’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, which has been threatening — pretty idly so far — to raise interest rates and shrink down its vault of hoarded securities — a lot of it janky paper left over from the misadventures of 2007-2009.

I guess the lesson is that when you have a pervasively false and corrupt financial system, it is always subject to a little additional accounting fraud — until it’s not. And the next thing you know, you’re sitting in the rubble of what used to be your civilization.

The ever more immiserated schnooks who make up the former middle-class know that their lives are crumbling, and may feel that they’re subject to the utterly overwhelming forces of a cruel destiny generated by a leviathan state that hates and despises them. And of course that is exactly why they turned to the Golden Golem of Greatness for salvation.

Alas, Mr. Trump has not constructed a coherent strategy for defeating the colossus of fakery that drives the nation ever-deeper toward the cold and dark. He has a talent for distraction and disruption, though, and so far that gave cover to a whole lot of other people in power who have been able to stand around with their hands in their pockets doing nothing about the sinking state of the nation.

Now, the vaudeville act is coming to a spectacular conclusion as the trappings of Halloween go back in the closet and the pulsating, LED-studded Santas go up on the rooftops. Every ceremony of American life seems drained of meaning now, including the machinations of government over the budget and taxes. The revolution to come out of this frozen swamp of irresponsibility will be the messiest and most incoherent in world history. Nobody will have any idea what is going on outside the geo-storm of failure.

About the only thing one can say for sure is that the American life which emerges from this maelstrom will not look a whole lot like what we’re living in today. I remain serenely convinced that when it finally passes, the air will be fresh again and the sun will shine, and a lot more people will know what is real and what is not.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/into-the-cold-and-dark/feed/280http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/into-the-cold-and-dark/In Memoriam: Harvey Weinsteinhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/XkDTS7D6QOM/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/memorium-harvey-weinstein/#commentsMon, 16 Oct 2017 13:36:20 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8476Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! The Greeks and Romans had one up on us: their gods and goddesses were not so easy to impersonate. Their gods and goddesses acted at a remove from everyday life, out of reach, except in the popular imagination. Two thousand years more »

The Greeks and Romans had one up on us: their gods and goddesses were not so easy to impersonate. Their gods and goddesses acted at a remove from everyday life, out of reach, except in the popular imagination. Two thousand years later, along comes Hollywood with an industry designed to manufacture gods and goddesses, and churns them out in its “dream factories” like so many floor lamps.

Movies, it turned out, with their close-up shots on the giant silver screen, were a much better vehicle for depicting human mythology than the creaky old stagecraft of the Christian church, with its limp and tedious liturgical hocus-pocus. America went cuckoo for movies in our insatiable drive to comprehend the human condition — or at least to see it represented artistically.

The stereotype of the Hollywood Producer has been vividly established for nearly a hundred years now: a vulgarian alpha male in an expensive suit working the casting couch in his office on the lot. The studios made not a few movies about this entitled, predatory stock character, even back in the day when their rule was absolute. He was as well known as Porky Pig. Harvey Weinstein was the apotheosis of this type.

Harvey Weinstein was in the goddess business, the way his ancestors were in the pants business or the pickle business. Women of a certain goddessy type came to him out of the cornfields, the cities, the slums, the backwaters of distant lands, and he transformed them into goddesses for the movie audiences. He was good at it.

For decades, it was as well-known in the movie business, as night follows day, that Harvey often behaved badly among the goddesses he created and trafficked in. His reputation among the ladies must have been something like a walking-talking roach motel, Hell-in-a-bathrobe, with rat poison on top. Had he the good looks of Errol Flynn, the decorum of James Mason, and the melancholy charm of Humphrey Bogart, he might have gotten away with it forever.

But he had the look of some wild Teutonic forest swine, a monster out of the Maurice Sendak Wild Things gallery, with his oversized head and that unfortunate six-day scruff of beard bristling over his hoggish jowels. He was a physical specimen of a villain that only his pet director, Quentin Tarantino, might have dreamed up. In body, he was the very essence of a slob. With all that money, you’d think he could have engaged the services of a personal trainer, a cosmetician, perhaps even a plastic surgeon to buff off the rough edges. But, perhaps, unlike everybody else in show business, he was comfortable being himself.

His antics were legend well before the recent official documentation of his evil deeds in The New York Times. It’s something of a wonder and a mystery that, over the years, more manufactured goddesses didn’t run shrieking from his clutches, or lodge a complaint with the proper authorities — but such were the blandishments of stardom, I guess, that they didn’t dare. You’d think a certain code would have been shared generously among the ladies around their pantheon: don’t ever let yourself be alone in a room, or even an elevator, with Harvey. If there was such a meme, it didn’t stick.

Paradoxically, this repulsive character, with his outrageously brutish temper to go along with his boorish approach to seduction, produced many of the truly excellent movies of the last quarter century: The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, Pulp Fiction, Il Postino, Flirting With Disaster, Emma, Good Will Hunting, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Chicago, Cold Mountain, Bad Santa, The King’s Speech, The Artist, The Human Stain, Silver Linings Playbook, Finding Neverland, Fruitvale Station, August: Osage County, The Fighter, Lion, and some not yet released. Many of these won awards, including Best Picture, from the film academy that tossed him under the bus last week.

Harvey’s story is an old one: hubris. He was too intoxicated with his own role as goddess-maker to recognize the dangers of fooling around in his own workshop. Especially in these times of all-out gender warfare. The other gnomes, elves, manufactured gods and goddesses in the Hollywood workshop only piled onto him when they thought it was safe (for their careers) to do so, so shame on them and boo-hoo. They’re as gutless as the grifters in congress.

But remember, there’s nothing that Hollywood, and perhaps America itself (if that entity still exists as a stock character), loves better than a redemption tale and a comeback. Harvey might do some jail time. When he comes out, I doubt it will be as a born-again evangelical pastor. But, heck, these days you can make movies on your phone. Don’t be surprised if the old reprobate turns up again in show biz, like the demonic “Michael Myers” in that sturdy old chestnut Halloween.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/memorium-harvey-weinstein/feed/354http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/memorium-harvey-weinstein/The Future (Not)http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/lnuK0_6UN98/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-future-not/#commentsFri, 13 Oct 2017 13:36:26 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8457Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! I took myself to the new movie Blade Runner 2049 to see what kind of future the Hollywood dream-shop is serving up these days. It was an excellent illustration of the over-investments in technology with diminishing returns that are dragging us more »

I took myself to the new movie Blade Runner 2049 to see what kind of future the Hollywood dream-shop is serving up these days. It was an excellent illustration of the over-investments in technology with diminishing returns that are dragging us into collapse and of the attendant techno-narcissism that afflicts the supposedly thinking class in this society, who absolutely don’t get what this collapse is about. The more computer magic Hollywood drags into the picture, the less coherent their story-telling gets. Hollywood is collapsing, and it’s not just because of Harvey Weinstein’s antics.

Movies of this genre are really always more about the current moment than about the future, and Blade Runner 2049 is full of hilarious retro-anachronisms — things around us now which will probably not be in the future. The signature trope in many sci-fi dystopias of recent times is the assumed ever-presence of automobiles.

The original Mad Max was little more than an extended car chase — though apparently all that people remember about it is the desolate desert landscape and Mel Gibson’s leather jumpsuit. As the series wore on, both the vehicles and the staged chases became more spectacularly grandiose, until, in the latest edition, the movie was solely about Charlize Theron driving a truck. I always wondered where Mel got new air filters and radiator hoses, not to mention where he gassed up. In a world that broken, of course, there would be no supply and manufacturing chains.

So, of course, Blade Runner 2049 opens with a shot of the detective played by Ryan Gosling in his flying car, zooming over a landscape that looks more like a computer motherboard than actual earthly terrain. As the movie goes on, he gets in and out of his flying car more often than a San Fernando soccer mom on her daily rounds. That actually tells us something more significant than all the grim monotone trappings of the production design, namely, that we can’t imagine any kind of future — or any human society for that matter — that is not centered on cars.

But isn’t that exactly why we’ve invested so much hope and expectation (and public subsidies) in the activities of Elon Musk? After all, the Master Wish in this culture of wishful thinking is the wish to be able to keep driving to Wal Mart forever. It’s the ultimate fantasy of a shallow “consumer” society. The people who deliver that way of life, and profit from it, are every bit as sincerely wishful about it as the underpaid and overfed schnooks moiling in the discount aisles. In the dark corners of so-called postmodern mythology, there really is no human life, or human future, without cars.

This points to the central fallacy of this Sci-fi genre: that technology can defeat nature and still exist. This is where our techno-narcissism comes in fast and furious. The Blade Runner movies take place in and around a Los Angeles filled with mega-structures pulsating with holographic advertisements. Where does the energy come from to construct all this stuff? Supposedly from something Mr. Musk dreams up that we haven’t heard about yet. Frankly, I don’t believe that such a miracle is in the offing.

The denizens of this 2049 Los Angeles are a rabble of ragged scavengers bolting down bowls of ramen in the never-ending drizzle. Apparently they have nothing to do, nothing useful or gainful, that is. So you can’t help wondering how this hypothetical economy supports such a population of no-accounts. I mean, we do know how our current economy supports the millions who are out of the work force, bolting their ramen between visits to the tattoo parlor: by giveaways based on pervasive accounting fraud backed by the now dwindling supply of oil that can be profitably extracted from the ground. But that won’t continue much longer. Know why? Because things that can’t go on, don’t.

One thing Blade Runner 2049 gets right in its retro-anachronistic borrowings from the present is the awesome joylessness of the culture. The artistry in this vision of the future is especially vivid in illuminating the absence of real artistry in contemporary “postmodern” American life. Sleek mechanical surfaces are everything, with no substance beneath the surface.

I walked out after two hours, and there was plenty more to go. It was too dreary, and too intellectually insulting to endure. I don’t blame Ryan Gosling, though. His look of doleful skepticism throughout the proceedings was perfect.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-future-not/feed/370http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-future-not/No Joy in Trumpvillehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/Uw5QJSemuSk/
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/8445/#commentsMon, 09 Oct 2017 13:07:40 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8445Clusterfuck Nation Now appearing Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! I took advantage of the calm before the storm, to pay a visit on Saturday to my hometown, Trumpville, a.k.a. Manhattan. My college buddy had a son who was acting in an off-Broadway play (closing night, so don’t bother asking). The more »

I took advantage of the calm before the storm, to pay a visit on Saturday to my hometown, Trumpville, a.k.a. Manhattan. My college buddy had a son who was acting in an off-Broadway play (closing night, so don’t bother asking). The city I knew as a kid — which, frankly, I never liked very much — seemed as lost and far away as Peter Stuyvesant’s quaint Dutch colonial outpost did to me in 1962.

That lost city of my childhood was one in which a boy could breeze right into the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a weekday afternoon — my school was one block away from it — without the least hindrance. The place was free. There was no “donation” shakedown at the entrance. And hardly anyone was there. Do you know why? Answer: because most of the adults on the island were at work. It was a mostly middle-class city back then.

I know. It’s hard to believe, given the more recent developments in American life — the salient one being the extreme and perverse financialization of the economy. That is actually what you see manifested on-the-ground (and up-in-the-air) when you visit New York these days. To be specific, what I saw sitting on a bench along the High Line — a walking trail built on an old railroad trestle through the former Meatpacking District into Chelsea — was all the wealth of the flyover states funneled into a few square miles of land on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

As I watched the endless stream of tourists and hipsters stride by in their selfie raptures, I pictured the various downtowns of the Midwest I’ve visited over the years — St Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Detroit, Akron, Dayton, Cleveland, Louisville, Tulsa, and many more — and remembered the incredible desolation of their centers. There was no one there, certainly no tourists or hipsters, really no activity to speak of. They were ghost cities. The net effect of financialization has been the asset-stripping of every other place in America for the benefit of a very few cities on the coasts, and especially the financial engineers within them.

Thus, the ironic rise of New Yorker Trump as the avatar and supposed savior of all those people “out there” in their dying hometowns and beyond. And their tremendously bitter enmity against the “blue” coastal elites, of which Trump is a nonpareil exemplar. History is a trickster.

What I also saw sitting on that bench facing west along the High Line, but also everywhere else I traipsed around the island that day, was the stupendous array of construction cranes against the sky, hoisting slender condominium towers into the clouds, many of them fifty stories and more. To me, it was a very ominous sight. Business cycles can be traced far back in history, but the cycles of these late techno-industrial times have been marked by the most extremes of extremity, and the current one is the dooziest of all.

And, of course, real estate development probably tends to greater extremes as a cycle within the greater economic cycle. Real estate booms and busts have come to characterize modern times, along with never-ending war and ecological carnage. The reason real estate rises and falls so dramatically is because it takes so much time to get these mega-projects permitted and to arrange the complex financing, and then built, then to market the units within. A project gets underway under one set of economic circumstances, and by the time it’s completed, things have changed. Say, a foreign country such as China or Russia puts capital controls on money fleeing its shores, and suddenly there are no foreign billionaires and oligarchs bidding on apartments in New York as a supposedly safe stash for their wealth. That dynamic is underway right now… as the cranes continue to hoist I-beams and glass claddings into the sky.

It’s easy to see that the skyscraper boom in Manhattan is going to end in a fantastic real estate bloodbath. It will accompany the general crash of the debt-fueled financialized economy, like the clanking, groaning, musical score of a horror movie. Unlike previous real estate debacles, these scores of skinny condo towers will not recover, even if they are sold in bankruptcy for dimes on the dollar. They may never even become slums. They will simply be uninhabitable cells in decrepitating buildings that can’t be maintained, because the capital won’t be there to enable it and the financing model based on the deconstruction of real estate rights — i.e. condo-ization — will be dead.

The skyscraper bust will also mark the end of the hypertrophy of New York and, eventually, of all mega-cities like it. They’ve exceeded a scale that will permit them to be maintained and repaired, and when financialization founders on its false foundations, there will be nothing left to support that way of life.

War, children, It’s just a shot awayIt’s just a shot away
— You Know Who

Grinning like Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, the Golden Golem of Greatness pronounced this interval of fine fall weather “the calm before the storm.” Hmmmm. Talk about cryptic. This was less than a week after he verbally smacked down Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for “wasting his time” trying to diplomatically reach “Little Rocket Man… “ whereby Rex riposted, calling the President a “moron.”

Ordinarily — say, during the past 220-odd years of this nation’s existence — talk like that would prompt a resignation (though, there are no other instances of talk like that). Tillerson must think that for the good of the country he can’t resign, and God knows what kind of desperate notes are being swapped around between the State Department and the Pentagon.

Where, of course, dwell the generals, lovingly referred to by the president as “my generals,” as if they came out of a trunk full of tin soldiers in the White House play-room. A lot to chew on there. For instance, perhaps the generals have been waiting more than a half century for a good excuse to light up some really odious adversary, just to see how well our serious ordnance works. Or maybe not. Maybe they are all extraordinarily temperate and judicious fellows, averse to apocalyptic violence. Or maybe they are panting to be let off the leash by POTUS… or maybe they want to leash and muzzle the president… and perhaps stuff him into a pet carrier and drown him in the Potomac. For the moment, it’s fun to ruminate on these things, the possibilities are so rich.

But then, we’re told that this is the calm before the storm. As it happens, just this morning the National Hurricane Center has a storm called “Nate” aimed squarely into New Orleans, ETA Sunday. Now that would be an event the USA does not need, considering how things have gone weather-wise this year. Stand by for developments.

But I doubt the president was referring to that the other day. We are entering a slot of time where an awful lot of things might go wrong. What gets me is seeing the stock markets make new record highs every other day, whether Puerto Rico is destroyed overnight or hundreds of people are shot in a Las Vegas parking lot — and notwithstanding the overall phony-baloney condition of the American economy, with half of the flyover population in an opiate daze, and chain-stores shuttering to the tune of 10,000 this year, and car leases expiring into a car market dependent on liar loans bundled into janky securities, and the debt problem festering away like a something dead under the floor boards.

Some kind of financial accident with a this-sucker-is-going-down flavor feels like it’s waiting to happen. I don’t think Trump was referring to that either, but what if it came down around the same moment that we decided to light up North Korea? Or, alternately, if Rex Tillerson, Mike Pence, and a score of other senior politicos decide that its time for Trump to go? The president is looking mighty friendless these days, and more than a little reckless. I mean, for the good of the country, ladies and gentlemen, what are they waiting for?

Will his generals defend him? Nah. Fuggedabowdit. I wonder what the code-name for their action will be. Operation Moron Overboard? The whole spectacle is starting to look like a Coen Brothers movie. When the time comes, I hope they will make the documentary about these strange days of October, 2017.

]]>http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/light-it-up/feed/327http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/light-it-up/October 2017http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterfucknation/~3/gPd-gFjwQ1Q/
http://kunstler.com/eyesore-of-the-month/october-2017/#commentsMon, 02 Oct 2017 15:39:05 +0000http://kunstler.com/?p=8403Behold, the Morningside Church, Blue Eye, Missouri. Run by the not-yet-late and still-great Jim Bakker — remember Jim and Tammy Faye, who ran the PTL Club (Praise the Lord) out of their Heritage USA theme park in South Carolina back in the 1980s? Ole Jim got hisself in a whole mess o’trouble when a cutie more »

Behold, the Morningside Church, Blue Eye, Missouri. Run by the not-yet-late and still-great Jim Bakker — remember Jim and Tammy Faye, who ran the PTL Club (Praise the Lord) out of their Heritage USA theme park in South Carolina back in the 1980s? Ole Jim got hisself in a whole mess o’trouble when a cutie named Jessica Hahn accused him of rape in a Florida motel and he paid her off to keep quiet with $279,000 of PTL funds. That was only the beginning of ole Jim’s trip down the Lost Highway. He was convicted in 1989 on 29 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy, all involving shenanigans around the sale of “lifetime memberships” in his racketeering operation that passed for a church.

Well, after serving about eight years in federal prison, ole Jim is back at it, with a downscaled version of his Heritage USA theme park, now in Missouri. He’s been saved and all his sins are forgiven. And he’s still got the God-given gift of gab that brings in greenbacks by the bale from decent folks.

That-there confused pastiche of a suburban house and a shopping mall is the new church. Looks homey as all git-out, don’t she? And built for the ages, I’m sure! Makes me want to get saved, too.

Thanks to Mike Drach for the nomination, who offers the new term PoMoHoJo to describe the architectural style.